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Google has announced that it will begin using HTTPS as a ranking signal. This is a welcome move because security is an increasing concern for internet sites and the effort to make the internet a safer place is one we all should share. Customers are concerned about things like security on the sites they use to make purchases, and every news item about changing your passwords again because of a new security breach keeps the concerns alive.

Right now, the use of HTTPS is what Google calls “a very lightweight signal” that affects fewer than 1% of global queries. But it’s clear that this will be part of what affects your search rankings in the future, so it’s a good idea to pay attention to their warning.

To directly quote Google’s basic tips to get started:

Decide the kind of certificate you need: single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate

Use 2048-bit key certificates

Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain

Use protocol relative URLs for all other domains

Check out our Site move article for more guidelines on how to change your website’s address

If your site already uses HTTPS and you want to make sure your security level and configuration is adequate, use the Qualys Lab tool to see how it fares. There’s also more information on web design and SEO at http://www.reciprocalconsulting.com/search-engine-optimization.php

Yelp has been around for ten years now, and they’ve got a decade’s worth of data compiled in the reviews and searches they are famous for. What have they done to celebrate? They’ve invited the world to their idea of a party, in the form of Yelp Trends. Why would this be a good thing for search engine optimization? To quote Yelp:

Our massive wealth of data and the high quality reviews contributed by the Yelp community are what allow us to surface consumer trends and behavior based on ten years of experiences shared by locals around the world.

Marketing is all about trends, and search engine optimization is essentially the art of figuring out the way to latch on to those trends and have the keywords and phrases that people are using to find what they want on the internet. If you could see what is trending, or has trended on Yelp, it could give insight into your own market. It’s interesting, too.

Plug in the words you are interested in and you can see a ten year graph of interest in those words in 98 cities (that’s 20 countries) all over the globe. It definitely can be a springboard for some brainstorming, and Yelp is right — it is fun. It’s also got the potential to be another insight into your local region’s search history if you are near one of the targeted areas.

What could you do with ten years of data? Probably a lot. For more information on search engine optimization and the ways it can affect your business, visit http://www.reciprocalconsulting.com/search-engine-optimization.php.

“Ever wonder why Google named certain algorithms after black and white animals (i.e. black hat vs. white hat?) Hummingbird is a broader algorithm altogether, and Hummingbirds can be any color of the rainbow.”

Panda and Penguin were going after webspam. Hummingbird is designed to optimize entity-based search. That means the Hummingbird algorithm is looking at what is said, how the keywords are placed, etc. Since Google uses over 500 algorithms and each one is going after different information, the exact “secret formula” for SEO is always going to be a secret. In fact, since those algorithms are constantly adjusted in an attempt to improve search, the secret formula keeps changing.

The nice thing that is pointed out, though, is that Hummingbird looks at more than the SEO savvy markup and can figure out relationship without it. This is natural search results instead of formulas.

Feeding the Hummingbird

Here’s a quick list of what is important to this algorithm:

keywords (subject-predicate-object triples)

tables & HTML elements

entities & synonyms

anchor text & links

Google Local

Google Structured Data Highlighter

Plugins

All of the elements are balanced and weighted to figure out how to do Hummingbird’s part of the whole secret zoo at Google. Each one of the algorithms plays a role in where your data comes up on the page. Interesting, isn’t it? The thing to remember is that there’s a big difference between trying to play the system and trying to get quality content available for your audience. Google is always going after the players because they want to stay relevant to the rest of us.

For more information on optimizing your site for natural search results, visit http://www.reciprocalconsulting.com/search-engine-optimization.php.

There’s a lot about search engine optimization that relies on algorithms, and marketers spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the secret formula is for page rankings. But really, much of what those algorithms are designed to do is interpret human behavior.

The whole reason Google keeps updating is to keep the human interaction at the forefront of their rankings so they are respected as a legitimate source of good content. If people used Google and got spam, it would not take long for Google to fall, and they know it.

SEO Is More Than A Magic Formula

Good SEO has to be more than figuring out the latest version of Google’s secret algorithm — it has to keep the humans you are trying to engage in mind. If you are consistently engaging your customers and using the language your target audience would use to find something on the internet, there’s a natural keyword development. All the details that make up your site must be geared toward making sense to your target audience, and being valuable to your target audience.

The traffic that results from human engagement is measured in numbers of visits and links, but the numbers are meaningless apart from what they represent. Optimizing those numbers focuses on the quality of what is happening, and that is the true value of SEO.

An alogrithm is a tool, but good SEO practices are an art.

You can’t really reduce SEO to an algorithm, but you can learn much more about the art of good SEO at http://www.reciprocalconsulting.com/search-engine-optimization.php

SEO is always going to be an area that changes, and there will always be something to learn as a result of the fluidity. Moz recently came up with a fun way to see what you know (and what you don’t know) about search engine optimization in their New SEO Expert Quiz.

The quiz is randomized so nobody gets the same questions in the same order, and Moz claims it is “astronaut training hard,” but the fifty questions only take about fifteen minutes to answer. The benefit of taking the time to do the quiz is in the results: you are shown the questions with your answer, the correct answer, and a link to learn more about the subject.

This is like a custom lesson in SEO stuff that targets your weak spots.

Even if you delegate your search engine optimization to someone else, it’s a good idea to keep learning about how it works overall so that you know what you are delegating. Their job may be to handle the details but you should know enough to appreciate what they do for you.

Understanding SEO basics prepares you for using the Internet with confidence, because the codes are no longer gobbledygook to your eyes. This quiz is a fun, nonthreatening way to gauge your SEO expertise and see where you fall in the learning spectrum. You may be pleasantly surprised to find that you know more than you realized and that your guesses in the quiz were intelligent deductions.

If you would like to learn more about SEO visit reciprocalconsulting.com/search-engine-optimization.php.

The last time you tried to find something with a search engine, did you think, “which strategic keywords will likely be on the site I want?” or did you think “I want to fix my bicycle so I’ll type in ‘how to fix a bicycle'”?

As someone interested in SEO, you may have been thinking about strategic keywords. Would someone interested in bicycles be thinking about keywords?

Probably not. They’d be thinking about bicycles, and that would be their intent.

Moz just asked some similar questions in Laura Lippay’s article on content strategy, and there’s some great content there along with examples and an interesting string of comments at the end. In Lippay’s view, audience intent wins over keywords as a motivation for content.

For instance, a person interested in bicycles would probably be interested in a site that is a source of bicycle-related ideas, pertinent content, authoritative reference material and discussions as well as a few products and some great humorous memes to share. They come to the site because it has stuff they are interested in (how to fix a bicycle) and come back because it continues to interest them. These interested visitors are more apt to buy what the site sells because there is a history of visits and they trust the site. That’s a win.

To quote Laura Lippay, “It all goes hand-in-hand. When you create something that your audiences like, that they link to more, share more, and engage with more, it’s likely to affect search engine rankings and traffic, too.”

What do you think? Would you agree?

For more on SEO and content, visit reciprocalconsulting.com/search-engine-optimization.php

Search Engine Journal highlighted a recent interview with Flipora’s Johnathan Siddharth and it is thought-provoking for anyone interested in internet marketing. Basically, Flipora is blurring the lines between search engine optimization and social media marketing by providing a platform based on recommendations.

“Flipora is proving to be a powerful new engine for discovering and/or marketing content to highly targeted and engaged users. Because the site studies user behavior and provides content based on individual preferences and history, businesses can use it to ensure their content is reaching audiences that are interested in it, and not annoying those who aren’t.”

There are currently about 30 million active users, with another 2 million projected to become active every month. That’s a testimony to the rapid growth of what is essentially a recommendation engine suggesting content based on user’s online preferences and behaviors.

Instead of backlinks and cookies, Flipora analyzes browsing history and matches users with similar histories. It is a way get your content shared with users who are likely to want that content, instead of hoping they find you by typing in the right keyword in a search engine.

This isn’t going to make traditional SEO obsolete, but it is another indication that marketing doesn’t break down into artificial categories with no cross-over. After all, people don’t successfully compartmentalize their lives, so it makes sense that reaching people with your message should be holistic as well.

Your internet marketing is part of your business, true, but the lines are blurred because the components overlap in some ways. The more effectively you integrate and coordinate reaching your customers, the more effectively your business operates.

For more information on social media optimization, visit reciprocalconsulting.com/social-media-optimization-SMO.php

Over on Search Engine Journal, Bill Belew has come up with The New Definition of Search Engine Optimization. He might be being a bit sarcastic, because he shares that most people don’t know the OLD definition of Search Engine Optimization. In fact, most of the people in his audiences just stare when he asks for one. Here’s his definition:

Search Engine Optimization is creating good content on a web site in the form of pages and posts that real people want to read, which satisfies the query AND can be found by a search engine. In that order. Readers first!

So what does this look like? It looks like the writer focuses on good content that has these 8 characteristics:

is served up with a title that promises to satisfy a query.

is original and delivers early on the promise of the title.

has images that are relevant to the query and are also searchable.

is consistently on topic within the site where it is found as evidenced by internal links.

appeals to other like-minded sources with relevant external links.

is recognized as such by other credible sites as evidenced by backlinks.

is sometimes timely.

is sometimes timeless.

The result will be good content that is found when people look for it because the keywords are logical and it’s on the first few pages of the results. It’s clicked on because the title looks like it will answer the question, read because it is well-written, shared because it is relevant, and optimizes your site’s reputation.

What do you think? Is this how you’d define SEO? You’ll find more information on the subject at reciprocalconsulting.com/search-engine-optimization.php

So we need to be thinking of our content as the primary focus, and links as highlights of that quality content.

“Think of it in terms of the top 40. A song reaches the number one spot if it sells the most (for SEO purposes sales = links) but you can’t just take a collection of words, with no melody and try and get sales. In order to get to number one you have to start with a good song (for SEO purposes song = content). The song may not be to everyone’s liking but as long as a large enough number of people like it, then they will buy (or link to!) it.”

Marketing techniques, Search Engine Optimization, Web Design, and all the rest of the package really are useless if the song/content doesn’t appeal to anybody. Being an authority with easy-to-find information goes a long, long way to get your site ranked high. It’s the song most people want to hear, and you will find that your links are shared by quite a few people.

If you need help getting yourself into the “top 40” and staying there, there’s help at reciprocalconsulting.com/search-engine-optimization.php.

Search Engine Optimization has been around for quite some time; long enough to go through an evolutionary process that has changed the way internet marketing is done. The goal of being on the first page of the search engine remains the same, but the method has changed as search engines used new algorithms to determine how to prioritize findings. It’s a constantly changing puzzle that keeps professionals challenged.

Social Media Optimization is the new kid on the SEO block, promising great things and looking easier to deal with than the arcane formulas of traditional search engine optimization. But is it an either/or situation? Of course not. Neither one is a magic bullet that will maximize your marketing goals. Both SEO and SMO are tools that need to be used skillfully in order to work well, and they should both be in your marketing toolbox.

SEO will be used to bring your business up in the ranks of a search engine. Since search engine algorithms are trending toward using social media input, SMO starts getting important in search engine optimization. But while there’s an overlap, social media optimization has a completely organic side based on human nature. The way you optimize your social media is by engaging people in an ongoing relationship. A first-time customer might find you from an internet search or from a “share” from a friend on a social media site. That is the beginning of the acquaintance and it grows through interchanges that increase familiarity and connection.

Optimizing your business means you use the technology at your disposal to develop the relationships with your customers that result in a loyal base you can rely on for future transactions. If you only have been thinking of SEO, you need to add SMO to your toolbox so you have the advantages of using both. If you need help with your social media marketing tools, you’ll find it at reciprocalconsulting.com/social-media-optimization-SMO.php.

If you’ve been online for any length of time, then you’ve probably noticed that images are becoming more and more prevalent. In the early days of the Internet, images were used primarily as a way to capture attention. Once they did that, they were pretty useless. Even then, it was not uncommon to find pages and pages of content with no images at all. Today, it’s getting harder to find such anomalies.

Images are important, but they’re not just to capture attention any more. They often serve a broader purpose.

For instance, infographics are images that tell a story. You can actually build a web page with no textual content and say much more with the string of images as story. Your challenge then is to drive targeted traffic to that image.

Images serve another purpose, however. They not only enhance the content on your page, but they can actually enhance your search engine optimization.

There’s more to it than simply splashing an image on a page and adding an alt tag to describe what that image is for. The search engines are now associating images with the surrounding content. This sort of contextual analysis is going to get even better. Welcome to the semantic web.

Getty Images recently announced that you can embed images onto a web page. You can now have free images with credits and SEO value added to your content with a simple click. That’s not bad.

Adding new content is one of the best ways to increase your search engine optimization, but it can be expensive in either time or money. If you write your own content, you could spend a lot of time writing and crafting that content to say what you want it to say. If you hire a freelance writer to handle your content for you, it could cost you a lot of money. But some SEO techniques don’t cost a lot of money.

One way to increase your search engine rankings and SEO potential is to increase your page load speed.

Google’s page load speed checker will tell you if your web pages load slowly and on what devices they load slowly. This is important information because if your site loads slowly on mobile, that will translate into a bad user experience. Your traffic will go down and Google will notice that your click-throughs are lowering. That will affect your rankings.

Another way to increase your search engine rankings is to employ rich snippets.

There are different types of rich snippets, but all of them are valuable in letting the search engines know what your content is about – and not just Google either. You can use metadata markup to let the search engines know what type of content exists on a page and help them rank it accordingly. Microformats can be used for

Book, movie, music, or business reviews

People

Products

Businesses

Recipes

Events

And more

Identify the type of content that exists on your pages and employ rich snippets when appropriate. This alone could boost the SEO for that content.

Yesterday, Bing announced the addition of some really cool features that should make it more competitive with Google. That’s not to say we can expect an immediate turn around in search market share, but Bing could gain 1% or 2% over a year with these new features unless Google responds with similar features. Historically, however, when Google follows, they choke. They are much better when they lead.

Here are the new features being offered by Bing now:

Discover TED Talks – TED Talks are very popular. If you search for a person who has given a TED talk, you’ll get a Snapshot pane with that person’s biographical information, including a list of their TED talks.

Famous Speeches and National Anthems – Listen to them online right from Bing’s search engine. If you search for a famous statesman, you can listen to famous speeches by that person with just one click.

Online Courses – Find free online courses from top universities.

University Rankings

Scientific Concepts – Search for a scientific concept and you’ll get the definition and explanation of it right in the search results, which is similar to Google’s dictionary listings and weather reports.

Historic Events – Looking for a historical event? Get information on it right in the search results.

Related People – If you conduct a search and get a string of snapshots, you can hover over the images of the people and see how they’re related to your search.

Animal Research – Search for an animal and get a list with images of subspecies of that animal.

Ask Bing – Ask Bing a question and get the answer in the search results.

App and Software Downloads – If you’re searching for a piece of software or a particular app, Bing will point you to the safest websites for download.

All of these are useful for searchers, but how will they assist Internet marketers in putting their products and services in front of potential customers? We encourage you to play with these features on Bing and get familiar with them. Then you can put together a strategy for improving your search rankings based on how Bing appears to rank pages for these particular searches.

All of this from a set of weird looking glasses you place on your head.

It’s all pretty cool, actually. But should website owners optimize their websites for Google Glass? What would that mean, exactly?

I think the biggest potential for Google Glass for search lies in the Local department. If you want to travel from one location to another, then local search is essential. Otherwise, organic search is largely a matter of general information. Not that that wouldn’t be useful.

Google Glass is still within its first year. One Google Glass user gives it a net thumbs up, but that’s one user.

It’s unclear just how useful Google Glass will be for most users in three to five years from now. Will it have a run of market success or market failure? Until the public decides either way, there’s no sense in webmasters thinking about optimizing for a product that may or may not be around in five years. Google has a bad habit of rolling out products that don’t last.

Don’t get me wrong. Google Glass is cool. I can see it interacting with web pages in some very cool and powerful ways. But changing your website to facilitate new gadgets cost money and time. You should weigh that investment against potential gains before you get too excited.

You’re better off investing in optimization for mobile phones and tablets at this point.

A few years ago there was a trend to classify all search engine optimizers into three categories. They were either white hat, black hat, or grey hat. These distinctions, borrowed from old spaghetti westerns, are readily recognized as the good guy, the bad guy, and the guy in the middle, respectively.

Today, there is less of a tendency to discuss SEOs in these terms, primarily because SEO has become “content marketing.” I don’t care what you call it, it’s still SEO.

More or less, you can still classify SEOs into three distinct classes, but let’s dispense with the references to hats. We’ll call them withers, forers, and againsters. Again, terminology isn’t the issue. Call them what you want. The idea is that there are SEOs who work with the search engines, those who appear to be search engine cheerleaders, and then those who seem to actively work against the search engines – just doing what they want.

That last category is a little bit difficult to define because if you get the wrong idea, you might think they are the same as the black hat SEOs of five years ago. Not necessarily.

The “working against” category could include contrarians and SEOs who just do their own thing. They aren’t really concerned with best practices or following the latest trends. That’s not to say they don’t employ SEO techniques. They are more apt to write in a natural language style or use plain English rather than stuff your content full of keywords.

What’s the takeaway?

When you hire an SEO team to write your content for you or to plan your content marketing strategy, ask them what their search engine philosophy is. Do they work with the search engines or do they sound like cheerleaders? Or, maybe, just maybe, they are those maverick types who do it their way, right or wrong. You deserve to know.

Search engine optimization is all about positioning your content so that you maximize the traffic you receive from it. In other words, your job as content marketer is to keyword-optimize your content so that you achieve high rankings, right?

Wrong.

It never was about that really – even before Google started reporting keyword data (not provided).

The essence of search engine optimization has always been about producing great content. Period. Sure, your content might contain keywords based your ability to research what is hot right now, but simply adding keywords to your content was no guarantee that you’d rank well for that content or, if you did, receive any traffic from your rankings.

Historically, Google has been littered with top ranking content that didn’t receive much traffic because it was easy to tell that content was low quality content despite its high rankings.

Google started reporting (not provided) to keep webmasters from relying on keyword-specific search queries to target search engine rankings with more keyword-based drivel. We simply don’t need more low quality content. What we need is more high quality content that answers searchers’ queries.

SEO has always been about answering searcher queries. Find a question that a lot of people want an answer to and provide them with the answer. If you do that, Google will like you.

It’s easy to talk about good search engine optimization. It’s even easier if you don’t have a clue about what you are talking about. SEO isn’t just something you do once and forget about it. It’s something you start and never finish.

That said, what is the most important part about providing good SEO? Is it …

Link building?

Keywords?

Your Title tag?

Meta tags?

Site speed?

Page titles?

h1 and h2 tags (heads and subheads)?

Actually, it’s none of those.

The most important part to remember about your website’s search engine optimization strategy is your audience.

Yes, your audience.

Most webmasters don’t think of their audience as an aspect of SEO. In fact, most SEOs don’t think of it that way either. But it’s very important to think about who your audience is and what your audience wants before you start trying to search engine optimize your content.

The reason is real simple. You are writing your content to appeal to your audience. Your SEO must be written with your human audience in mind or it won’t matter what the search bots think of it. That not only goes for the optimization part of your content but the language part, as well. Your content needs to be written in the language your audience understands, and by “language” I don’t mean French vs. English. I’m talking about word choices, sentences structures, etc.

Those considerations are every bit as important as your keyword usage.

There seems to be a trend to think in terms of a dichotomy where SEO and content marketing are concerned. I often see articles that encourage companies to pursue an online content marketing strategy AND an SEO strategy. To be sure, they’re practically the same thing.

Content marketing is any strategy you have to produce content in any form and publish it around the Web. You may or may not optimize that content. It’s up to you.

SEO, or search engine optimization, requires content. You can’t have SEO without some kind of content. It would be like driving a vehicle without a car. The vehicle is your content marketing strategy. The car is your SEO. They’re somewhat distinctive but the same.

I’ll try another analogy. Let’s say you want to go from your house to the library in your town but you have no transportation so you must rely on public transportation. You take the bus. The bus follows a certain route that you have no control over. Nevertheless, you have a choice about taking the bus or not. You could walk, call a friend, or do nothing at all.

The bus is your content marketing strategy. The route is your SEO. There may be multiple routes from your house to the library, some better than others. The bus system is designed to follow a particular route. If you take a taxi, you could get to the library more quickly but it will cost you more.

Following this analogy, it may seem like SEO and content marketing are two separate things – and they are. But they are intrinsically linked.

Whether you take the bus, the taxi, or you walk to the library, you are still taking a route (an SEO path). Your SEO is something determined by your content marketing strategy (the bus system) and sometimes it isn’t, but the two are linked. The truth is this, you can’t have a content marketing strategy without SEO – even if that SEO is somewhat ineffective.

The new buzzword in online marketing is “content marketing.” It’s a curious phrase because many veteran SEOs and Internet marketers don’t really see a difference between the new content marketing and what they’ve been doing for years. The truth is, there is a subtle difference.

Search engine optimization is the process of writing content in such a way that you improve its ability to rank in the search engines. That’s a kind of content marketing, but the term “content marketing” is actually a broader, more encompassing term.

Content marketing actually involves other types of content.

If you post videos to YouTube and other video sharing sites, then you’re engaged in content marketing. If you share your images on Pinterest, you’re performing a content marketing task. If you’re doing any kind of link building or maintaining social media accounts, then you’re involved in content marketing.

Infographics are a type of content marketing too. Graphs and charts, if published on the Internet (or even in print, I suppose), are a type of content marketing.

If you write guest posts, build Squidoo Lenses and HubPages, and publish articles on Web properties you don’t own, even if you don’t get a link back to your website, that’s content marketing.

It’s called content marketing because it requires that you first create content (in any form) then push that content out on the Internet (and other places) so that you reach a desired audience. If you expect your audience to then find you in hopes that you can do business with them, then you’re doing content marketing.

As more and more blogs and websites enter the Internet and the search engines make room for them in their indexes, images become all the more important. Recent search engine indexing changes make images much more important for search engine optimization purposes.

Either you can join a premium stock photo website and pay for your images or you can try to find public domain images, or free use images, to enhance your blog or website.

Free sounds better, doesn’t it?

While “free” usually means low quality, with images, it doesn’t have to. You CAN get free high quality images for your blog and website. You just have to look around a little bit.

Here are 4 sources you can use to find free images for your Internet marketing use:

Flickr – Flickr is a photo sharing website owned by Yahoo! Users upload their own photos and images and set their own policies for usage. The best way to search Flickr is to go into The Commons area and search for images with a Creative Commons license.

unprofound – unprofound is a non-profit website where registration isn’t necessary. They have few limitations.

Zemanta – Zemanta is a WordPress plugin that suggests images based on the content of your blog post as you enter it. There are some downsides to the service, but it is free and you have to be careful that you do choose photos that are free for public use.

Creative Commons – Just like Flickr’s The Commons, Creative Commons is a website that offers images on a variety of terms. Read the terms carefully for each image and choose only those that are offered for free. One pitfall is selecting images that are not available for commercial use and using them for commercial use. Read the terms.

You are encouraged to use images on your website and blog. If you can get your images for free, that’s a great option.